Temporal Nuances of Coordination Network Semantics

TL;DR

This paper explores the semantics of coordination networks on social media, emphasizing the importance of temporal factors and introducing preliminary insights into their construction and role in political Twitter datasets.

Contribution

It advances understanding of coordination network semantics and highlights the significance of temporal elements in detecting coordinated inauthentic behavior.

Findings

Temporal elements are crucial in coordination detection.

Cheerleaders help identify social bots.

Preliminary observations in political Twitter data.

Abstract

Current network-based methods for detecting coordinated inauthentic behaviour on social media focus primarily on inferring links between accounts based on common "behavioural traces" [19], such as retweeting the same tweet or posting the same URL. Assuming the goal of coordination is amplification, boosting a message within a constrained period, most approaches use a temporal window to ensure the co-activity occurs within a specific timeframe [9, 14, 19, 24]. Real-world application requires considering near real-time processing, creating performance requirements, which also highlight gaps in the semantics of coordination in the literature. These methods could all exploit temporal elements of coordinated activity. We describe preliminary research regarding coordination network semantics, coordination network construction, relevant observations in three political Twitter datasets and the role of cheerleaders in revealing social bots.